Friday, November 30, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt five)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

When Howard Hughes became a regular at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1942, he was in his late thirties and already one of the wealthiest people in the world, famous as a film producer, aviator, and entrepreneur. He was also becoming infamous for the obsessive-compulsive disorder that would intensify and come to dominate his life over the next several decades. The disorder manifested itself in myriad ways, most readily in his distaste for being around other people, exacerbating an already eccentric personality. Toward the end of 1947, after Hughes survived the first of several near-fatal plane crashes, he locked himself in the screening room of a studio near his home for four months, reputedly living off of chocolate and chicken, distracting himself from near-constant physical pain by watching movies. Soon after Hughes emerged, he rented a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel, reserving individual rooms for several associates and girlfriends. He put the hotel staff through their paces, demanding that they place roast beef sandwiches in the crook of a particular tree, hide pineapple upside-down cakes for him throughout the grounds, and, finally, install a phone booth in his suite. The hotel, of course, had personal phones as well as public phone booths, but by that time Hughes felt that most of the world could not be trusted. “They’d switch different booths in and out of different bungalows,” reported producer Richard D. Zanuck to the Los Angeles Times, “because he [Hughes] didn’t want to go through the hotel operator.” Hughes had the requisite power and money to remove himself from the fray as much as he wanted, enjoying both the psychological and physical shelter provided by a literal phone booth.



Thursday, November 29, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt four)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

The phone booth suggests a world in which communication is precious, urgent, clandestine, contingent. People talking in phone booths and at phone kiosks often exhibit an angle of repose—what is, in geology, “the maximum slope, measured in degrees from the horizontal, at which loose solid material will remain in place without sliding.” Virtually no one stands up straight; nearly everyone leans, usually against the triangular shelf beneath the telephone, or against the wall of the booth itself. They follow the line of the telephone, which follows the line of the face. It is an angel of nonchalance, absorption, self-importance, seduction; they are on the verge of sliding. David Bowie played with this lean beautifully on the back cover of his album Ziggy Stardust. In the photograph Bowie, as the alien Ziggy in a turquoise jumpsuit, stands in a British telephone box, arm resting on his hip, the other on the telephone, ready to call home from London.



Wednesday, November 28, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt three)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

In her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion’s main character Maria Wyeth senses an atmosphere fraying at its edges when she observes an unnaturally long line to use the pay phone at the grocery store: “The telephone in the apartment was out of order and she had to report it. The line at the pay phones in Ralph’s Market suddenly suggested to Maria a disorganization so general that the norm was to have either a disconnected telephone or some clandestine business to conduct, some extramarital error.” As ubiquitous as elevators, but used much more rarely, public phone are intimately linked with varying degrees of disorder—from the incidental to the truly catastrophic, which is the context that gave rise to their existence in the first place.



Tuesday, November 27, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt two)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

Calls made from pay phones and phone booths create their own mode of communication. It’s a mode that revolves around urgent contact, finite contact, emergency contact, ubiquitous contact, democratic contact—the phone booth could provide asylum to anyone, be he ne’er so vile. It’s a mode that wears its heart on its sleeve, so many public phones being etched with the tragedies of their users that their tragedies become shared tragedies. It’s a mode that offers the promise of privacy and the possibility of anonymity. It’s a paranoid mode. It’s a mode, once upon a time, that seemed more our speed. It’s a mode that is in motion and also a pause in motion. As Holden Caulfield wanders through New York City, delaying his arrival home after being kicked out of prep school, he is constantly entering and exiting phone booths, never quite knowing what he wants to say when he gets someone on the line, and often just sitting, as if phone booths are places to simply be, as much as they are places from which to call.



Monday, November 26, 2018

the last book I ever read (Phone Booth (Object Lessons), excerpt one)

from Phone Booth (Object Lessons) by Ariana Kelly:

Standing in a garden in Ōtsuchi, a small town in the Iwate prefecture, on the east coast of Japan, there is a nonworking telephone booth that has nevertheless been used by more than ten thousand people since the spring of 2011, when a 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami killed fifteen thousand people and dislocated hundreds of thousands more. Built by Itaru Sasaki, a sixty-nine-year-old resident of the area, so that people could communicate with loved ones who were killed or missing, the wooden-framed booth—which has plate glass windows and a door that closes—is named “Kaze no Denwa Box,” or Phone Booth of the Winds. Although he installed a rotary dial telephone within the booth, Sasaki never connected the line; instead, there is a small notepad on the shelf beneath the telephone where people can leave messages and trust that the wind will carry the contents to their intended recipients.



Sunday, November 25, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt ten)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

While Scott consorted with the New York ghosts who haunted him, Zelda concentrated on the present. Alone with his manuscript over the phantom wash of the Mediterranean, Scott did not notice that Zelda and the aviator Edouard Jozan were becoming closer, but everyone else on the Riviera did. Rumor began to quicken and race, as her oblivious husband remained lost in the pages of his novel.

But oblivion, like love, can’t be trusted to last forever. “The Big Crisis” came on July 13, Scott wrote in his ledger. Two weeks after the papers recalled the Hall-Mills case, matters appear to have come to a head over Zelda’s feelings for Jozan. Stories differ, as they always do. Some say that Zelda asked Fitzgerald for a divorce, telling him that she wanted to chase her chance for happiness; others that Scott confronted her and demanded that she end whatever was happening. Gossip has been speculating about what exactly that was ever since. Zelda’s romance with Jozan may have been a serious affair, or as insubstantial as a flirtation and a moonlight kiss. But it is clear that for Scott and Zelda, the affair, whatever its particulars, was deeply damaging; Zelda genuinely cared for Jozan, it seems, and Scott did not forgive easily.



Saturday, November 24, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt nine)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

The Times reported that on the same Thursday in December President Harding had told the Senate, “When people fail in the national viewpoint and live in the confines of a community of selfishness and narrowness, the sun of this Republic will have passed its meridian, and our larger aspirations will shrivel in the approaching twilight.” It is possibly the only wise statement Harding made during his presidency—until he supposedly confessed just before he died under the pressure of the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration in the summer of 1923, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”



Friday, November 23, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt eight)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

Four days after Beer stood him up, Van Vechten invited around a poet named Wallace Stevens, who brought the manuscript for Harmonium, his first collection of poems, which Van Vechten had helped persuade Alfred Knopf to publish; it would come out in early 1923 and become one of the defining events of American modernism, including such now-classic poems as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Anecdote of the Jar.” “I do not know which to prefer,” Stevens famously wrote in Harmonium, “the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes.”

In life, however, it seemed that Stevens had less difficulty identifying his preferences. After drinking “half a quart of my best bourbon,” Van Vechten reported, “Wallace told me he didn’t like me” and left. So much for the beauty of innuendoes.



Thursday, November 22, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt seven)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

On the chilly, rainy Monday evening of November 6, most of the writers of the Algonquin Round Table gathered at the premiere of a musical revue they had written with Ring Lardner. The ‘49ers played for a grand total of fifteen performances, until November 18, when it fell flat on its face.



Wednesday, November 21, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt six)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

On Sunday, November 5, Carl Van Vechten attended a cocktail party that appeared to be hosting “all the kept women & brokers in New York.” One of the other guests was twenty-four-year-old George Gershwin, who entertained the party by playing his hit song from The Scandals of 1922, “I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise.” It could have been the theme song of Jay Gatsby, who would see a stairway to paradise on the streets of Louisville as he kissed Daisy Fay for the first time. The bandleader Paul Whiteman, who recorded “Stairway to Paradise” in 1922, would commission Gershwin two years later to compose a serious, full-length jazz composition; the result was “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered in February 1924, two months before the Fitzgeralds quit New York for the blue Mediterranean.

Gershwin’s invention was inspired, he said, by the daily rhythms and noises of urban life, sounds of modern America being born: “It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer—I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise . . . I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.” Gershwin’s original title for the composition about metropolitan madness was “American Rhapsody,” until his brother Ira suggested that he model himself on the titles of James McNeil Whistler's paintings, such as Nocturne in Black and Gold.



Tuesday, November 20, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt five)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

The cheating Black Sox, Rosy Rosenthal, and Charles Becker are all transposed directly into the fictional world, where they anchor The Great Gatsby in an actual American history of murderous corruption. He divagated over Gatsby’s various vices, but Fitzgerald always knew that his central character was a gangster: this is a story about cheating. Gatsby admits to Nick that he has been in the drug business and the oil business: by 1925, both enterprises were notoriously corrupt. The oil industry was at the heart of the scandal that would bring President Harding’s administration crashing down in 1923. Gatsby is implicated in the era’s widespread financial swindles as well: eventually Nick learns that he was fencing stolen bonds. In the drafts of Gatsby, Nick reports hearing that Wolfsheim was later “tried (but not convicted) on charges of grand larceny, forgery, bribery, and dealing in stolen bonds.”

Gatsby’s crimes are not merely an array of prohibition-era get-rich-quick schemes, although they are that. They are swindles, frauds, and deceptions, suggesting fakery and dishonesty. Everything about Gatsby is synthetic, including his gin—everything except his fidelity.



Monday, November 19, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt four)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

Max Gerlach has haunted Fitzgerald scholars for decades, and some years ago a few hired a private detective to run him to ground. A man named Max Gerlach ran a garage in Flushing in the 1930s and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the 1950s. When Gerlach joined the U.S. Army in 1917 he was required to give character references; two of his references were Judge Ariel Levy and George Young Bauchle. Levy was known as a fixer for a gangster named Arnold Rothstein and Bauchle was an attorney and the front man for a floating gambling club run by Rothstein, called the Partridge Club.

Fitzgerald's first biographer, Arthur Mizener, was contacted by a man named Gerlach in the 1950s, who identified himself as “the real Gatsby,” but Mizener declined the invitation to meet. Perhaps he was uninterested in anyone capable of the category error of declaring himself a “real” fictional character, or of believing that a catchphrase and a history of black market dealings suffice to define one of literature’s most popular inventions. Maybe Mizener was also remembering a bootlegger named Larry Fay, who was famous for the trunkloads of brightly colored shirts he boasted of having shipped from England, or the extravagant parties of a bootlegger named George Remus. Perhaps he was remembering how much of himself Fitzgerald later said he had shared with Gatsby. Years later Fitzgerald inscribed a copy of Gatsby with what he perceived at the time to be its failings: “Gatsby was never quite real to me. His original served for a good enough exterior until about the middle of the book he grew thin and I began to fill him with my own emotional life. So he’s synthetic—and that’s one of the flaws of the book.” Max Gerlach may have believed that he was the real Jay Gatsby, but for Scott Fitzgerald he was only the original—assuming Gerlach is indeed the man to whom he referred.



Sunday, November 18, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt three)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

Swope helped inspire not Gatsby’s house, but his parties. Everyone who was celebrated or witty was invited to the Swopes’ renowned gatherings. The Fitzgeralds were great favorites for a time until, rumor has it, at one party Zelda took off her clothes and chased Mrs. Swope’s shy, sixteen-year-old brother up the stairs. He locked himself in the bedroom and for the rest of his life he would be teased for the opportunity he passed up. Mrs. Swope, it is said, banned the Fitzgeralds from returning to her house.

But all that was yet to come—if it is true. In the first heady months of their festivities among the Swopes and their guests the Fitzgeralds, thronged by a crowd of admirers, would stroll out to the gardens, where they would settle down with a few bottles of Swope’s first-rate bootleg whiskey: he claimed never to serve alcohol that hadn’t first been tested by chemists. People would picnic out on the grounds or stroll across the quiet road down to the beach. In the late afternoon sun they would stretch out on the porch or in the garden and go to sleep. When they woke, the band would have arrived; they’d change into evening clothes and thenext stage of the festivities would commence. Songwriter Howard Dietz said the Swopes’ parties were so dependable that if you were in Great Neck and “happened to be hungry at four in the morning, you could get a steak. Everybody drifted Swopeward.”



Saturday, November 17, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt two)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

In 1922 Long Island remained a series of small villages deep in farmland, connected by country roads along which horse-drawn carriages clopped, slowing down the shiny new roadsters. The Long Island Expressway would not be constructed for decades: the red touring car took the Fitzgeralds and Dos Passos along Jackson Avenue, Route 25A, now Northern Boulevard. Past cobbled slums presided over by the dark saloons of the previous century, they drove through rolling hills. The population of Queens gradually thinned as the land extended east, from the small working-class neighborhoods edging New York City just across the bridge, through large swaths of land unburdened by buildings. Jackson Avenue carried them into Flushing, one of the first of the Dutch settlements on Long Island, after driving through Astoria, where Nick and Gatsby would scatter light with fenders spread like wings.

About halfway between New York and Great Neck, just beneath Flushing Bay, stood the towering Corona Dumps, vast mountains of fuel ash that New York had been heaping on swampland beyond the city limits since 1895, in a landfill created by the construction of the Long Island Rail Road. By the time the ash dumps were leveled in the late 1930s (and eventually recycled to form the Long Island Expressway), the mounds of ash were nearly a hundred feet tall in places; the highest peak was locally given the ironic name Mount Corona. Created to protect the city’s inhabitants from the constant grime of coal ash on the streets, the Corona Dumps were soon piled high with all manner of refuse including manure, and surrounded by stagnant water. By 1922 desolate, towering mountains of ashes and dust stretched four miles long and over a mile across, alongside the road that linked the glamor of Manhattan to the Gold Coast. In the distance could be seen the steel frames of new apartment buildings braced against the sky to the west. Refuse stretched in all direction, with goats wandering through and old women searching among the litter for some redeemable object.



Friday, November 16, 2018

the last book I ever read (Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby, excerpt one)

from Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell:

His wife, chic, provocative Zelda, was considered a great beauty, a woman of “astonishing prettiness,” although it is agreed that photographs never did her justice, failing to convey “any real sense of what she looked like . . . A camera recorded the imperfections of her face, missing the coloring and vitality that transcended them so absolutely.” Zelda’s honey-gold hair seemed to give her a burnished glow and her ĂŠclat was soon legendary.

Her greatest art may have been her carefully cultivated air of artlessness; Zelda understood the aesthetics of self-invention. The flapper was an artist of existence, Zelda said, a woman who turned herself into her own work of art, a young and lovely object of admiration. Her behavior was calculated to shock. Meeting Zelda for the first time nine days after her marriage to Scott, his friend Alec McKaig wrote in his diary, “Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town, Southern Belle. Chews gum—shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big—then die in a garret at 32.”



Thursday, November 15, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt ten)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.



Wednesday, November 14, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt nine)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.

“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.



Tuesday, November 13, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt eight)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage, frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive, and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress—I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about, and morning would be too late.



Sunday, November 11, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt seven)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, with a plate of cold fried chicken between them, and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her, and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale—and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.



Saturday, November 10, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt six)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easy going blue coupĂŠ.

“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested Jordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it—overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”



Friday, November 9, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt five)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.



Thursday, November 8, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt four)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder”—I doubt it he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Myer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russell Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewers and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.



Wednesday, November 7, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt three)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensation!” Whereupon everybody laughed.

“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.”



Tuesday, November 6, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt two)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought if might sober me up to sit in a library.”

“Has it?”

“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re----"

“You told us.”

We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.



Monday, November 5, 2018

the last book I ever read (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, excerpt one)

from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff, husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.



Saturday, November 3, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt twelve)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy.

“Oh Tatie,” she said, when I was holding her in my arms, “you’re back and you made such a fine successful trip. I love you and we’ve missed you so.”

I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn’t until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris that the other thing started again.



Friday, November 2, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt eleven)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

Scott then asked me if I were afraid to die and I said more at some times than at others.

It now began to rain really heavily and we took refuge in the next village at a cafÊ. I cannot remember all the details of that afternoon but when we were finally in a hotel at what must have been Châlon-sur-Saône, it was so late that the drug stores were closed. Scott had undressed and gone to bed as soon as we reached the hotel. He did not mind dying of congestion of the lungs, he said. It was only the question of who was to look after Zelda and young Scotty. I did not see very well how I could look after them since I was having a healthily rough time looking after my wife Hadley and young son Bumby, but I said I would do my best and Scott thanked me. I must see that Zelda did not drink and that Scotty should have an English governess.



Thursday, November 1, 2018

the last book I ever read (Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, excerpt ten)

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget. He had come into the Dingo bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall, pleasant man who was with him as Dunc Chaplin, the famous pitcher. I had not followed Princeton basicall and had never heard of Dunc Chaplin but he was extraordinarily nice, unworried, relaxed and friendly and I much preferred him to Scott.

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.